Written by Hoshina
Edited by Fang Qi
** AI Large Model Workshop
If there are an infinite number of monkeys, and they have an endless amount of time, it is possible for these monkeys to play the full Hamlet.
Imagine if we likened these typing monkeys to a program capable of generating random characters, and Hamlet as a sequence of characters arranged according to a certain pattern, then the principle of the infinite monkeys would be very similar to today's large GPT models.
Mobvoi's self-developed large model "Sequence Monkey" is named here. We only need to provide the machine with a large number of text sequences, and then train them with powerful computing power, and finally we can get a large model of "sequence monkey" with intelligence.
The "Sequence Monkey" born in April this year is becoming the trump card product of Mobvoi after 8 months of growth, and at this time, Mobvoi is sprinting to the first share of the Hong Kong stock "AIGC" with the "Sequence Monkey".
On December 21, the International Department of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) disclosed the filing notice on Mobvoi's overseas issuance and listing. Mobvoi has completed the filing of the Hong Kong stock listing, or will soon conduct a listing hearing, in addition, Mobvoi will plan to issue no more than 2206.3 billion shares of common stock.
Although large-scale models have been hot in the past year, there is still no AIGC concept company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. If it is successfully listed this time, it means that Mobvoi will become the "first AIGC stock" in Hong Kong stocks.
After nearly a year of savage growth, the competition for the basic model has come to an end, and the prelude to the application has just begun. In the changes brought about by large models, Mobvoi has an advantage in many large model companiesCan it be successfully listed?What are the challenges?And how to build your own moat?
As early as May 30 this year, Mobvoi submitted its first application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in an attempt to hit the "first share of AIGC", which expired at the end of November and updated its prospectus the next day, with CICC and CMB International as its joint sponsors.
And this time, Mobvoi's road to listing is destined to be difficult.
Mobvoi was founded in 2012 and was spearheaded by Li Zhifei. Zhifei Li holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University, and worked at the Silicon Valley Research Institute, engaged in the research and development of core algorithms in the fields of speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine translation.
With generative AI and voice interaction technology as its core business, the company is one of the few AI companies with the ability to build general-purpose large models, and is also the first company in Asia to develop and commercialize generative AI large models.
According to the prospectus, Mobvoi has carried out a total of 7 rounds of financing from 2013 to 2019, with a total financing of more than 2US$300 million, investors include Sequoia Capital, Haina Asia Venture Capital**, Zheng**, Google, Volkswagen Group and other well-known enterprises and investment institutions.
The company's valuation has also soared from $5.1 million in Series A funding to $7.2 in Series D2$5.7 billion, and the valuation has skyrocketed more than 140 times.
With the strong boost of capital, Mobvoi's performance has developed rapidly. From a financial point of view, from 2020 to 2022, Mobvoi's revenue will be 26.5 billion yuan, 39.8 billion yuan and 500 million yuan, corresponding to adjusted net profit of -15.7 billion yuan, -07.3 billion yuan, 10.9 billion yuan.
However, in the first half of 2023, Mobvoi's revenue and profit will both decline. According to the latest prospectus, Mobvoi's revenue in the first half of the year was 26.2 billion yuan, adjusted profit of 65.09 million yuan, compared with the same period last year, the two indicators declined respectively. 3%。
The reason for this is mainly due to the impact of the decline in revenue from the smart device and hardware business and the vehicle business.
At present, Mobvoi's business can be divided into two modules: AIoT solutions and AI software solutions.
Mobvoi incorporated the TicWatch series of smart watches, smart treadmills, smart homes and other products into the AIoT smart device business. Before 2022, it was the core business of Mobvoi, contributing 83% and 85% of revenue in 2020 and 2021, respectively, and in 2022, the proportion of AIoT solutions in revenue fell sharply to 394%。
AI software solutions include AIGC solutions for content creators and AI software solutions for enterprises.
Specifically, AIGC products for content creators include the AI dubbing assistant "Moyin Workshop" and its overseas version "Dupdub", the AI writing assistant "Moshuo", and the AI digital human "Wonder Yuan".
On the B-side, Mobvoi provides humanized and intelligent AI voice interaction solutions for many industries such as the automotive and financial industries. But in fact, the business is mainly for car affiliate A. According to the prospectus, from 2021 to June 2023, the company's revenue from customer A accounted for the total revenue. 0%。Many voices from the outside world speculate that the big customer A here is Volkswagen.
The sharp increase in cooperation revenue in 2022 is due to an intellectual property agreement signed by the two parties at the end of 2021, that is, Mobvoi provides Volkswagen with services such as car voice interaction solutions, with a contract value of 55 million US dollars.
With the end of the intellectual property agreement in June this year, the stability of Mobvoi's long-term development in the automotive market is worrying.
In the prospectus, Mobvoi mentioned AIGC nearly 250 times, which shows the company's importance to large models.
Li Zhifei can be said to be the first group of people in China to pay attention to GPT-3, in June 2020, after the appearance of GPT-3, Mobvoi began to explore the Chinese version of GPT. He has stated on several occasions that "GPT-3 is a triumph of the aesthetics of violence. ”
In 2021, Mobvoi officially released the large model "UCLAI", but because it was difficult to find a balance between commercialization and R&D costs, it stopped investing in the large model. Until ChatGPT was born, AIGC became a hot emerging track, Mobvoi resumed the research and development of large models, and launched the large language model "Sequence Monkey" in April this year.
Mobvoi, which started again, seems to have a new thinking about how to make a large model and how to achieve commercialization.
At the level of large-scale model construction, multi-modal capability has become the focus of Mobvoi's development of large-scale models. Li Zhifei said that if the large model is to eventually produce applications in all walks of life, it must be implemented through agent or copilot. The input and output of the agent depend on multimodality, and without multimodality, there is no agent.
The "Sequence Monkey" launched by Mobvoi is not only limited to language ability, but also a large language model with multimodal generation ability. The model not only has general language capabilities such as logic, reasoning, and dialogue, but also supports different tasks such as text generation, ** generation, 3D content generation, speech generation, and speech recognition at the same time.
Li Zhifei believes that in the future, the best "job" of large models is to be a human copilot (assistant), and Copilot will be ubiquitous, and will be widely used in creators, C-end, and B-side.
At the level of commercialization, Mobvoi is exploring two new business models: to PC (professional consumer), professional individual;to SMB (Small and Media Business), small and medium-sized enterprises, that is, more concerned about the commercialization opportunities of creators and small B-side.
At present, the commercialization path of Mobvoi to PC has been relatively clear, and the profit model is relatively mature, adopting a hybrid model of monthly payment + pay-as-you-go. According to official data, as of November 28, 2023, Mobvoi's AIGC products such as Moyin Workshop, Mobi Writing, and Wonderful Yuan have more than 8 million cumulative registered users, as well as about 600,000 cumulative paying users.
On the small B-side, Mobvoi mainly provides customized large-scale model services and personalized solutions. At present, it has carried out cooperation and exploration with more than 500 industry customers such as Spring Airlines, Early Morning, China Mobile, China Telecom, Yiche APP, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and VIPKID, covering various scenarios such as enterprise consulting, education and training, overseas product introduction, oral broadcasting, and live broadcasting.
Mobvoi is actively exploring in the field of large models, but whether it can really run through remains to be verified by time.
The development prospect of large models undoubtedly has a huge imagination space.
Mobvoi mentioned in the prospectus that according to CIC Consulting, the size of China's AIGC market is expected to reach 32.6 billion yuan by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of 136 from 2022 to 20273%。
Even though the business prospects of large models are still a blue ocean, it is an indisputable fact that large model research and development "burns money", and it is also a fact that few companies can really use large models to make money.
Taking the LLAMA-13B version as an example, according to the data in Meta**, its pre-training uses A100 (80GB video memory) to run 1350,000 GPU-hours. Assuming 1,000 cards and running for 135 hours, it is equivalent to about 5 and a half days. And these 1,000 graphics cards are almost 100 million yuan. If you add the costs of other hardware servers, data centers, electricity bills, and R&D personnel, the capital threshold for large model pre-training is between hundreds of millions and billions (corresponding to models with tens of billions to hundreds of billions of parameters).
Li Zhifei once publicly stated that the number of parameters of the "sequence monkey" model is about 10 billion, which can be imagined to the extent of its money-burning. Although Li Zhifei once said frankly that Mobvoi does not consider financing in the near future and does not need external financing to support R&D investment, a dig deeper into its financing progress will find that Mobvoi has not received investment for 4 years since it received its last investment of about $16.87 million in 2019.
According to the latest prospectus, as of October 31, 2023, its cash and cash equivalents were only 159.8 billion yuan. How far can Mobvoi, which lacks capital support behind it, go?
In addition to being cash-strapped and facing tough external competition, Mobvoi also has to deal with fierce external competition.
After the emergence of ChatGPT, 238 large models were born in China within a year, and large manufacturers such as Alibaba, Tencent, and iFLYTEK have left the market, and they have been opened to the public in August. In addition to the pressure from large manufacturers, Mobvoi is also facing competition from the same type of products.
In the face of so many troublesome questions, how to use existing resources to build their own moat and dispel the doubts of the capital market when sprinting to the IPO of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange?
If the competition barrier in the first half of the large model is the barrier of computing power, but in fact the barrier of money, then in the second half of the competition of the large model, data and users may become a new moat for enterprises.
Some people say that the accumulation of data in the vertical field is the moat of the enterprise, and the data flywheel can be used to widen this river. In fact, the data that is easy for everyone to obtain is not a barrier, but the data that users interact with in their own products is the barrier, and the combination of data and their own products to form a data flywheel is a more reliable barrier than models and computing power.
Specific to Mobvoi, whether it is the launch of AI smart watches, smart treadmills and other smart hardware products or based on the "sequence monkey" launched "Magic Sound Workshop", "Magic Writing", "Wonderful Yuan" and other AIGC products, Mobvoi is striving to combine user usage data and products to form a unique data flywheel to deepen its moat.
In the future, with the continuous evolution of large-scale model technology and the continuous expansion of application scenarios, the importance of data and users will become more prominent. For Mobvoi, how to make better use of the data flywheel effect and turn it into a sustainable competitive advantage will be the key to winning the second half of the large model competition. 36Kr is released with permission.